By Alex Halberstadt. On the face of it, pop treated Pomus abysmally. A harder look at how and why would have given a lively biography a bit more weight

Doc Pomus's name may sound familiar but compared to the songs he wrote, or co-wrote, the man is still a relative unknown. His legacy of popular classics is vast. Save the Last Dance for Me, Teenager in Love and Viva Las Vegas are just three of the 1,000 or so compositions he left behind at his death in 1991, and that are estimated to have sold in total around 250m records.

At his creative peak, fame was not the name of the game for guys like him on pop's production line. Between 1955 and 1964, when Pomus and his partner Mort Shuman were churning out half a dozen potential A or B sides a month from their office in New York's Brill Building - the original Tin Pan Alley - the only famous popular songwriters were the guys who wrote the musicals - Rodgers and Hammerstein et al. Phil Spector, the teenage producer